Friday, October 03, 2014

Highlights included the Award for Academic Excellence & the Director’s Prize, both presented to Vanessa Paixao, who gained a First Class Honours Degree in Combined Studies. Vanessa took a year out of her studies after a serious accident. She achieved an exceptionally high grade for her dissertation, an analysis of Charlotte Brontë as a ‘feral’ author. (Craven College)

USA Today makes a list of all the literary references made in Friends:

Episode: "The One with Ross' Sandwich"Book: Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë and Jane Eyre, Charlotte BrontëIn search of a new hobby, Phoebe decides to take up a literature class. Unfortunately, Rachel tags along as a classmate and is more interested in reading Vogue and stealing Phoebe's answers than truly participating. (Kelly Gallucci)

Mantel’s artful use of various classic storytelling gambits no doubt reinforces one’s sense of this all-of-a-pieceness: her Brontë-esque preference for knowing, if not cynical, first-person female narrators (who can nonetheless turn out to be catastrophically naïve or even delusional) (Terry Castle)

I particularly enjoyed reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. It was one of my favourites – the sad tale of a romance that went tragically wrong. The first cinematic version made in 1943 was excellent, with the great Orson Welles playing the tragic figure of Mr Rochester.

The writer’s home in Ardwick has been completely transformed to take it back to Victorian times when she lived there - writing famous works including North and South and Cranford.From this Sunday, visitors will be able to sit at the dining table where Gaskell entertained Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters, or the desk where she penned her novels.

At 5 p.m. on Oct. 2, former Ida May and William J Eggers, Jr., Chair in English at UC Berkeley, Catherine Gallagher held a discussion about “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, dedicated to a friend and colleague. “Wuthering Heights” was originally regarded with great ambivalence and distaste due to its unyielding intensity. It was influenced by Gothic literature, which valued mystery and fear, holding dear the concept of revenge. However, Brontë’s work is thought to transcend this genre with her nuanced and thoughtful approach to writing but also with her unapologetically morose and ardent plot. (...)Revenge plots of the Victorian Era are rife with mysteries, secrets and relationships kept in the dark. An example that Gallagher provided the audience with was Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” and how readers are not familiar with her wedding tragedy until nearly the end of the novel. Gallagher’s main points of her discussion revolved around temporal variations throughout the novel and revenge versus repair. She illustrated the first point by explaining how the story is narrated starting almost at the end of the story, when “Wuthering Heights” is established, which swathes the entire remainder of the plotline in mystery. This feeds into the central conflicts of the protagonist’s, Heathcliff, revenge and ultimately how his plot to ruin the lives of those who made his life miserable backfired and repaired the story, giving an otherwise melancholy and tragic story a happy ending. Gallagher also briefly discussed issues of legitimacy, patriarchy and control. (Rachel Dobkin)

Is there a piece of art, or a book, or a play, which changed you?The book that rocked my world, more than any other, was Wuthering Heights. For years I tried to date Heathcliff. With predictable results. (...)What is the piece of art/novel/collection/ you wish you’d created?Wuthering Heights (both the book and the Kate Bush song).